In 1425, Thomas
Sherman of Blythburgh, described in court as a poaching canon,
was accused of taking the Lord of the Manor's rabbits. His fellow
canons were regular visitors to the Westwood warren. In 1442 no
fewer than three of them were in the manorial court, having been
caught in the act with their specially reared greyhounds. Indeed,
it was recorded that the operation had the express knowledge of
the prior himself.

The canons favoured
greyhounds. Other poachers preferred lurchers (greyhound/collie
crosses) better suited to working rough heathland. Geoffrey Sewale
of Walberswick (caught in 1448) set traps, while for many ferreting
was popular. One Blythburgh canon ran a profitable business leasing
out his well-trained animals to other poachers.

It is easily
forgotten that the rabbit, a modern pest, was a valuable contributor
to the medieval rural economy. The right to keep and kill rabbits
was the exclusive privilege of the owner of free-warren (warren
being used in a legal sense, not to describe a land feature). Introduced
in the twelfth century by the Normans - one of the earliest archaeological
records is from the Buttermarket in Ipswich - it was kept in warrens
for meat and fur. Until the eighteenth century coney was the common
name for the adult and the term rabbit was reserved for the young,
or kitten. Natives of Iberia, they began as relatively delicate
creatures, needing artificial breeding chambers, and extra food
during the winter. Some escaped but they were rare outside warrens
until the eighteenth century, although as their numbers increased
the lord's rabbits could play havoc with his tenants' crops. Changes
in farming practice solved the rabbit's problem of how to get through
the winter. Winter crops were planted for animal fodder, and natural
predators were eliminated to protect game birds. In the nineteenth
century the growth in rabbit numbers was phenomenal.

Rabbit production
in Blythburgh, where sheep and rabbits grazed together at Westwood,
was small scale in comparison with the great warrens of Breckland
Suffolk and Norfolk: the perimeter of Thetford warren extended to
eight miles at one stage. Crops such as sow thistles, dandelions,
groundsel, and parsley were planted in the warrens for the rabbit?s
benefit but imported food was usually needed in the breeding season,
in bad weather, and during the winter. The Thetford rabbits would
get through 80 acres of turnips in a severe winter. In the 1460s
about 1,000 rabbits were killed each year in Blythburgh. Of some
1,500 in 1464-5, 100 went to the prior (hopefully keeping his canons
away from the warren), 58 to the warrener, the manor household ate
250, 286 were given away, and 800 sold in London for 17 17s. 0d..

Poaching was
such a lucrative business in the fifteenth century that organized
gangs were at work. A pre-emptive strike by court officials on the
Walberswick base of one east Suffolk gang revealed lurchers in the
houses of four men, and ferrets and a net in one of them. The Walberswick
men were less ferociously equipped than counterparts of the 1440s
in Thetford, who boasted soldiers tunics, steel helmets, and bows
and arrows.

A rabbit can
live for 8-9 years but few in the wild get beyond their second year
and three-quarters die in the first three months. More males than
females die. But the species has been amazingly resilient in the
face of adversity. Commercial warrening ended when foreign competition
caused the prices of meat and fur to collapse in the late nineteenth
century. Rabbit was no longer the luxury food it had been in the
middle ages. But the rabbit had already demonstrated, against all
nineteenth-century predictions, its capacity to survive in the wild.
It also recovered from almost complete elimination by myxomatosis
in the 1950s. When a wild rabbit was caught by a fifteen year old's
dog on an allotment in Great Glemham in 1956, it was brought for
identification to an elder of the parish, who noted 'things are
soon forgotten and the next generation will never know the pleasure
of seeing this creature and its many pretty ways'. Forty-five years
on, the beleaguered Blythburgh gardener can only think, if only!.

Further reading. John Sheail, Rabbits and their History (Newton
Abbot, 1971); Mark Bailey, "The Rabbit and the Medieval East
Anglian Economy", Agricultural History Review, 36 (1988) pp.
1-20.